Day: October 26, 2018

Exploring world-class destinations, learning about unique cultures, and treating your taste buds with delicious foods is what traveling is about. And the fun of traveling multiplies if you are flying to a foreign destination, more if that’s your first international trip.

To help you prepare, here are some international travel tips you’ll find useful on your first vacation abroad.

Know Your Travel Budget

Are you traveling as a backpacker or want to bask in the luxury your hotel and airline may offer you? Knowing how much your vacation may cost you can help you budget your trip. It’s great if you already have the money in your bank. If not, take the time to prepare your budget and allocate your funds wisely.

Create an Itinerary

This includes everything from the length of your trip to the attractions and landmarks you wish to explore. You don’t have to know the exact dates and time but a rough idea of when, where and for how long you’ll be staying there can greatly help you. Certainly, you wouldn’t want to be wondering what to do next with three or four more days in your hand, do you?

Book Flights and Hotels

With the internet at your disposal, once you know where you are going, booking your international flights, hotels, and activities are perhaps the easiest part of planning your trip. However, you must not be impatient to book whatever you find through your travel agent. Browse the internet and find out some great deals for yourself to make the most of your budget.

Pack Light and Right

No one likes to pay for extra bags unnecessarily! If you don’t wish to be levied with additional charges, knowing a little about the weather in your destination and packing accordingly may help you. Pack as less as possible.

Pack woolen clothes if you think it’ll be cold where you land and pack light clothes if it’s summer there. Don’t forget to pack a few waterproof jackets, a poncho, and a light sweater if your destination tends to experience rain a lot. This practice will also allow some space for you to bring home some keepsakes for your loved ones.

Buy travel insurance

We all want our vacations to be full of happy moments and great experiences, but that’s not always the case. For not-so-pleasant situations while traveling, such as lost baggage, health issues or trip interruption, you must buy travel insurance. Speak with your travel agent or ask people you know for recommendations and have an insurance that provides great services.

Automate Your Bills

A missed credit card payment or mortgage repayment may be the last thing you would like to discover after you are back from your vacation. You can automate your personal finances to ensure that your dues are paid on time while you are on a flight, sleeping in your hotel room or clicking pictures of a breathtaking sight before you. Do it and save yourself from incurring late charges.

For the latest instalment of his wildly popular “Lip Sync Battle” segment, Fallon invited Saturday Night Live favourite Tiffany Haddish into the arena.

Both kicked off with some solid ’90s nostalgia. Fallon shimmied through Deee-Lite’s 1990 banger “Groove Is in the Heart,” but Haddish absolutely nailed the Lady of Rage’s 1994 track “Afro Puffs.”

The late show host picked Post Malone’s “Psycho,” which seemed to slow the pace, but Fallon picked it up with a few of the rapper’s signature face tattoos. But Haddish went old school for James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” with some highly fancy footwork. Read more…

Innovusion, a two-year-old startup developing LiDAR sensor technology for autonomous vehicles, has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Chinese firms Nio Capital and Eight Roads Ventures along with U.S.-based F-Prime Capital.

Other seed round and strategic investors joined the round, the startup said.

Nio Capital is the venture arm of Nio, the Chinese electric automaker aiming to compete with Tesla. Nio, which raised $1 billion when it debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in September, has operations in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, although it only sells its ES8 vehicle in China.

Innovusion, which was founded in November 2016, says it will use the funding to scale up its operations, specifically to ramp up production of its light detection and ranging sensor system called Innovusion Cheetah. The company began shipping samples of the system in the second quarter of 2018 and is beginning to take customer orders.

The round of funding will allow the Los Altos, California-based company to expand its R&D team and manufacturing facilities to more quickly develop, market and deliver Innovusion Cheetah LiDAR to customers around the world, according to Junwei Bao, the company’s co-founder and CEO. The company primarily is targeting customers in China and the U.S.

LiDAR is used by companies developing autonomous vehicles to detect and measure objects on the road around them. Most of the companies testing AVs believe LiDAR is an essential sensor required to deploy self-driving vehicles safely on public roads. It’s what has propelled demand for LiDAR and, in turn, an array of startups to pop up and try capture market share away from Velodyne, the long-time dominant leader in the space.